Artisan Archive

The whole idea of a miner was already in the game during the Beta. They were called Industrialists. It was removed from the game because no one enjoyed the profession. It has already failed, therefore, I think this is beating a dead horse. Farmer is just a variation of this, so I would lump it together with your miner idea. I would like surveying to count for something, but, about the only thing I can think of is making it the tree you have to climb in order to use various sizes of harvesters.

This is a cleaned up version of my Refining proposal from the other thread.

New & very different Refining Proposal
Purpose: to replace changing resource quality or adding a "quality modifyer" that would not be implemented because it's too complex of a change to the existing system.

I like the refining idea. Refining is defined as the combination or distillation of materials. If you have an unknown petrochem you should be able to distill it to a Known Reactive and a Known Inert petrochem. Refining should produce other named materials that are in the game, but the distillations and combinations should follow these basic patterns:

Refining Rules
1) you always get less than you put in
2) there is a maint and power cost
3) the bennefits are not always worth it (no free lunch)


New Crafting Process
It would be great to have a "refinement process schematic" whereby you don't just chunk materials in a factory and expect something to come out. A miner should have a special crafting station and experimentation tool whereby they consume many resources in different proportions to create a "Refinement Process Schematic". This schematic would go into the factory with its requirements and it would produce crates filled with the result. Anyone can use a refinement factory but only "miners" can make these schematics. The numbers in parenthesis (1 -> 2) indicate number of input resources -> number of output resources. This keeps refinement realistic per material.


The Skill Bonuses (as they relate to the elite mining profession)

Novice Miner
* Refinement Schematic: Water Purification (1 resource -> 1 resource, with reduction in volume based on quality of schematic)

Refinement I: Mineral Milling
* Refinement Schematic: Mineral Refinement (2+ -> 1 slight reduction in volume, only one where zero reduction is possible) (all ores & metals, excludes radioactives & solid petrochem)

Refinement II: Chemical Distillation
* Refinement Schamatic: Chemical Distillation (1 -> 2+)
* Refinement Schematic: Gas Distillation (1 -> 2+)

Refinement III: Solid Power Refinement
* Refinement Schematic: Radioactive Refinement (1 -> 2+ high-end resource is greatly reduced, the slack is poor-er quality)
* Refinement Schematic: Solid Petrochem Refinement (2 -> 1, combine solid petro with wood, or turn wood & chem into solid petro)

Refinement IV: Flora Grafts & Splices
* Refinement Schematic: Flora Engineering (2 -> 1)

Master Miner
* Refinement Schematic: Fauna Engineering (2 -> 1) (yes, hide & bone -- this would be huge)


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Well the entire problem that your proposal has with adding an intermediate step between raw resources & final products is one that will:

* take a long time to design & implement

* put a lot more stress on the game economy and because of its complexity eliminate many crafters from the game



The other proposal in the miners thread here introduces another quality to minerals, which will:

* require a massive rewrite of the entire crafting system

* add a fair amount of complexity, but won't be as drastic because



I like the idea of preserving resources the way they are, but allowing players to recombine them into better resources. This accomplishes the following:

* gives a scientist/miner profession a desirable product to manufacture

* does not add any complexity to the crafting process for players (they still buy the same exact thing)

* does not require ANY code changes for the current crafting system

* only requires 4 new factories, 1 crafting tool, 6-10 new schematics and some new code to govern the resource type output by those schematics and their variable input -> output efficiency.

* adds the "alchemist experimentation" style of play (Squaresoft's Vagrant Story anyone?) that I enjoy a lot. This will give some players an endless graph of hopefully deterministic formulas to discover and work on producing in increasing efficiency.

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Vaedross wrote:
k... what did you think of the alternate refining proposal?

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It's actually not all that different in terms of the profession itslef. My proposal on SWGX sounds complicated because I go into detail of how the system would work well in the current feature set. How xP works et cetera. The other arguement that is being made with mine is that the whole resource arena should be an entirely seperate professions line than artisan.

It's good, but doesn't go far enough.

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Osmol wrote:
It was removed from the game because no one enjoyed the profession. It has already failed, therefore, I think this is beating a dead horse. Farmer is just a variation of this, so I would lump it together with your miner idea. I would like surveying to count for something, but, about the only thing I can think of is making it the tree you have to climb in order to use various sizes of harvesters.

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That is a negative. Raph has said that Miner is on his personal 'to do list' for post-launch. If you want the quotes i can grab em. Miner was not play tested by players at any point during beta. A limited version of the profession was internally tested by the EQ era guys, and they decided to scrap it because they didn't have enough time to make it work well and immersively in time for launch. (on top of all the other core elements, that were argueably not ready by launch.)

Your arguement kind of makes sense in theory, but in reality it is not the case.

Hey i'd like to co-operate to make a better Miner proposal. Do you want to join forces and see which areas we can agree on, and which can be compromised?

Signed up to your forums, but I don't know if I can keep up with its entire volume I allready do many forums hehe

Ok I just approved you. We are going to be updating the miner/scientist proposal soon. The Profession Forum doesn't move quite as fast as the main discussion board... it should be fine...